overclocking fuxored my win2k installation! HELP!

[Chris-the dude]

When trying to increase the performance of my memory timings today, win2k did a reboot when it was starting up - no big deal - I just restored the timings and tried again. After resetting everything to factory defaults, it still reboots every time I try to start it up - even in safe mode! I don't have a win2k recovery disk, but I do have the original cd. running the repair utitilies still doesn't fix it.

At this point I'd just like to save my "My Documents" files. When I boot into the restore console from the cd, it gives me an "access denied" message when trying to copy files from my win2k partition even though I had logged in as administrator. Does anyone have any other ideas on how to save my files before I reinstall?

HELP!

[Oni]

You could do a repair install of the OS. All that does is nukes the system files, and replaces them w/ working versions. You'll have to re-apply all your updates, but that's a small price to pay to get all your data back.

[Chris-the dude]

I'm pretty sure the install said it would wipe out all user data also, like the "my documents" folder, so that wouldn't work for me.

It turns out I found this nifty utility called ntfs reader that works from DOS that can read (and copy) ntfs partitions from FAT partitions. The only problem is that its copying all the filenames with that crazy squiggle ~ that are too long for DOS. I guess I'll deal with it. - thanks for the reply.

[Audioaficionado]

It won't over write anything other than system files. Anything else will survive if you don't format but just leave the file system intact. I don't know about the my documents folder but whenever I did a reinstall, the installed programs in the program folder were still there and all my desktop items were still there. I had to reinstall them so they could be registered with the OS but the data was still there.

Better back everything up anyway before you try as this is windows we're dealing with and things can go terriblely wrong at any time without warning.